It is a common advertising and promotional technique to place coupons, discount cards, prizes, or other promotional materials into containers such as cartons for breakfast cereal or snack items, on top of plastic-wrapped products such as cheese slices, or into form-fill-seal bags such as bags of pretzels, popcorn, or chips. The coupon is highly visible to the consumer who can then use the coupon for the intended purpose, such as for discounts on future purchases or rebates. Accordingly, the term "coupon" used herein includes any type of insert, coupon, card, sheet, receipt, warranty, premium, or other part that can be advantageously handled in accordance with the invention hereinafter described. Similarly, the terms "container" and "receiving product" are used in the broadest possible context to include containers such as boxes, tubs, cans, bags, sacks, and vessels of all kinds as well as other coupon receiving objects that can be advantageously used with the present invention.
Typically, coupon inserting devices operate by discharging or positioning a single coupon in each container rapidly moving along a conveyor system or other similar product handling system or by inserting a single coupon into each bag filled by a form-fill-seal packaging machine. There exist several methods and apparatuses for placing a single coupon into the container or bag. One requires a stack of pre-cut coupons that are individually dispensed from a downwardly sloping channel, such as the system shown in Prewer, U.S. Pat. No. 4,530,200. In that system, pusher elements and advancing rollers coact to withdraw the forwardmost coupon from the precut stack. The coupon is then drawn into the downwardly sloping channel to a dispensing location. In another apparatus, shown in Gallimore, U.S. Pat. No. 4,197,113, a reciprocal vacuum head picks a coupon from a stack of pre-cut coupons and places the coupon on a conveyor system, which in turn transports the coupons to the containers. Another system, shown in Lewis et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,354,894, requires the use of a mechanical cutting device to separate each coupon from a continuous web. Once separated, the coupons are dispensed to the containers using a conveyor system. Yet another system, shown in Kotsiopoulos, U.S. Pat. No. 5,079,901, separates a single coupon from a continuous web of coupons using a bursting technique and shoots the coupon into the container.
There are several limitations and disadvantages to the above described systems. First, the systems using pre-cut coupons are highly susceptible to jamming when operated at a high rate of speed, and many of the pre-cut systems are not easily adaptable to a variety of coupon, container, or packaging machine configurations. Second, many of the pre-cut insertion machines and the mechanical cutting machines are simply incapable of reliably processing coupons at high insertion rates. Third, existing burster-type machines are expensive to purchase and maintain because they generally require the use of multiple stepper-motors for bursting the coupons and the use of expensive control systems. Finally, existing burster-type machines cannot provide the bursting force necessary to separate many types of perforated coupons. This invention provides solutions to some of the problems raised or not solved by the systems described above.